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I love Team Fortress 2. I’ve got thousands of hours in the game, playing casually, competitively, Mann vs. Machine (MVM) tours, jump maps, exploring bizarre community servers – I’ve done it all. But after going to university, I found myself having less and less time for TF2, spending my time on more constructive pursuits like going to the pub. Then the Jungle Inferno update came along, and it was the perfect chance to fling myself back into the chaos of Valve’s iconic hat simulator.
And it was great! New maps, new weapons, a campaign, an SFM animation, and of course, new cosmetics. It was nothing mind-blowing, but after around 15 months since the largely disappointing Meet Your Match update, it was a solid, fun event, and I couldn’t wait to see what would come next – and boy did I wait.
What the me of 2017 and the rest of the TF2 community had no idea about, was that the Jungle Inferno update would be the last major update for nearly six years.
There were the annual Scream Fortress Halloween updates, but these largely serve to add cosmetics and a couple of new maps, all of which were community created. The closest that TF2 came to a major update in these six years was the implication of the perpetually ‘in-development’ Heavy update, something with so little basis in reality, that it’s effectively a meme now.
And yet, with a drought of content longer than some game’s entire lifespans, Team Fortress 2 didn’t just survive, it thrived. The game regularly brought in over 100,000 players a day on Steam, sitting just below games like Grand Theft Auto 5 and Rust, and comfortably beating the likes of Call of Duty and FIFA. But even so, with a lack of updates, it seemed almost a matter of time before TF2 began to fully decline.
So when a post on the game’s official blog appeared in February of this year, the community lost their collective heads. Valve was announcing a major update for this summer, and was asking for community-made content to feature in it. “Valve still cares!” the players cheered, hugging their loved ones and dancing in the streets as they celebrated the resurrection of their beloved game.
But parts of the player base were not so forthcoming, and it’s not hard to see why. Once this update does come out, what’s stopping Valve from abandoning the game for another six years, if not longer? If the game is to survive, Valve needs to step up in terms of updates, and the solution has been under their nose all along – it’s even something they’ve already been doing.
Since 2011, players have been invited to submit their own creations to the Steam Workshop, with the promise of the best ones being added to the game, paying a cut of purchases of the item from the in-game store. For years, player-made maps, weapons, cosmetics and more made up the bulk of TF2’s updates, supplemented by a few official Valve-made creations, and in the recent Halloween updates, the content has been 100% community-made.
The defence usually posited on Valve’s behalf is that TF2 simply doesn’t warrant the resources it would require when the company has two much larger games. 100,000 users a day is nothing when Dota 2 brings in 600,000, and CS:GO over a million. But with a Steam Workshop containing tens of thousands of submissions for Valve to choose from, it doesn’t feel as if Valve’s efforts on other games would be too heavily impacted.
Seven of the game’s nine characters have over 9,000 weapons, cosmetics, and taunts available on the workshop. There are a similar number of maps. Naturally, not all of these will be up to scratch, but if Valve were able to find enough high-quality creations to pack their updates with in the past, what’s stopping them from doing the same now?
The number of new additions to the workshop since Jungle Inferno could have filled tens, if not hundreds, of unique updates, and all it would require of Valve is to simply pick the best ones. More updates means more incentive to create items, meaning more updates. Valve can create a self-sustaining cycle where they can release regular updates without having to create a single piece of content themselves.
When the Summer 2023 update finally released, it brought 14 new community maps, 25 new cosmetics, new taunts, unusual effects, exploit fixes and more. And the community response was beyond all expectations, as the update also brought something even bigger: a new concurrent player record.
Before the update, TF2’s all-time player peak was around 167,000 players. Within the hour, that had risen to 180,000, and in less than 24 hours, it had breached 250,000. Players new and old were flocking to TF2, eager to support the game they loved, and beyond a few of the traditional bugs on launch, it’s hard to argue that the update hasn’t been a resounding success.
All this isn’t to say that Valve has nothing to do at all. New updates are just the start, but there is more to be done. A serious botting problem has made many official servers unplayable for years, and despite a community protest in May of last year leading to a promise to fix it, there has been no news since.
For years, Valve as a company has effectively treated TF2 and its dedicated player base as a cash cow. Eric and Jill – the two solo developers at Valve running the show – can’t sustain it all on their own, and Valve needs to do more to provide the support that the TF2 community deserves. Regardless, Eric and Jill, and all other individual developers that have stepped up deserve all the credit they get and more.
The Summer update can be the first step in the right direction if Valve wants it to be. The success of an update made entirely of community-made content could spell the beginning of a resurgence, where community-led updates become a regular occurrence. The fans of Team Fortress 2 have stubbornly kept this game alive for years, and given the chance, they could help this game to flourish once more, Valve just has to let them.
